Chapter 8
I assumed they contained payments to politicians, police officers, and union leaders. Corruption was the foundation of every empire in the city.
But Elena would not have risked her life over ordinary bribes.
“What kind of network?”
“She never told me the full truth. She only said that people were disappearing and that the records proved they had been targeted.”
“Where are those records now?”
“I don’t know.”
“You expect me to believe Elena trusted you with her child but not the evidence?”
“She said the evidence had to remain hidden until Lily was safe.”
A cold unease spread through me.
“Where did she die?”
“In a car explosion outside Philadelphia.”
I remembered the news report.
A burned vehicle had been found near an abandoned warehouse eight years earlier. The driver’s body was never identified.
The date had been four days after Isabella disappeared.
“You were with her?”
“No. She left Lily with me the night before. Elena said she was meeting someone who could get us out of the country.”
“Who?”
“She never said.”
I stood and walked toward the window.
Below us, people moved through the park without knowing that the foundation of the Moretti family had just shifted beneath my feet.
Elena had not betrayed us.
She had been trying to expose something.
And someone had killed her for it.
Behind me, paper slid across the table.
Lily had opened her scholarship envelope again. A second document fell out and drifted to the floor near my shoes.
I bent to pick it up.
It was a copy of her birth certificate.
The mother’s name was listed as Elena Rose Marino.
The father’s line was blank.
“Marino,” I said.
“One of Elena’s false names,” Isabella explained.
I studied the date.
May you like
Lily had been born eight months after the ambush that nearly killed me.
A memory surfaced.
